This section is intended to provide a background or context to the invention that is recited in the claims. The description herein may include concepts that may be pursued, but are not necessarily ones that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated herein, what is described in this section is not prior art to the description and claims in this application and is not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
In order to facilitate communication of video content over one or more networks, several coding standards have been developed. Video coding standards include ITU-T H.261, ISO/IEC MPEG-1 Video, ITU-T H.262 or ISO/IEC MPEG-2 Video, ITU-T H.263, ISO/IEC MPEG-4 Visual, ITU-T H.264 (also know as ISO/IEC MPEG-4 AVC), and the scalable video coding (SVC) extension of H.264/AVC. In addition, there are currently efforts underway to develop new video coding standards. One such standard under development is the multi-view video coding (MVC) standard, which will become another extension to H.264/AVC.
For inter-view prediction in progressive coding, a view (view B) is coded with inter-view prediction from another view (view A). In this case, a view component in view B uses the corresponding view component in view A as inter-view prediction reference. The reference picture list construction processes specified in the current MVC standard can be directly applied for reference field view components, but these processes lack the ability to address different field view components of a complementary field view component pair. Consequently, a field in view B can at most use either a field with the same parity or a field with the opposite parity as inter-view prediction reference. Allowing only one field view component (with the same or opposite parity) to be used as inter-view prediction reference in a non-adaptive manner is not efficient from coding efficiency point of view.